


Sweet Pea

by TheNarator



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Schmoop, Sick Fic, Sick Newt, Spoon-Feeding, That's it, hermann takes care of newt, just a sick fic with hermann spoon-feeding newt split-pea soup, that's all there is to it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2539976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNarator/pseuds/TheNarator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann knows exactly what to do for sick lab partners.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet Pea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voxDei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxDei/gifts).



Newt hated being sick. He’d always hated being sick, how it made him miss school (which he loved) and stopped him doing experiments (a relief to his father, really) and made reading for any sustained period of time impossible (not such an uncommon thing for him, but more pronounced and more annoying now than ever). When he’d finished school and begun working he’d still hated how it prevented him from getting anything done. He had so many tests to run, so many theories to explore, and the idea of a virus robbing him of so much precious time was maddening. Once he’d started working for the PPDC he hated feeling like he was letting everyone down, like everyone else was fighing a war and he was laid up fighting the sniffles. The thought that every day spent away from his lab might have been the day he made the breakthrough they needed, that someone in a Jaeger might be dying needlessly when he could have provided the answer, haunted him and stopped him getting any rest. Newt hated, hated, hated being sick.

Most of all though, he hated being sick away from his Uncle’s split pea soup. Split pea soup made everything better.

"For the last time, no I do not need to go to med bay!" he shouted, losing his temper with Mako at last. She’d already bullied him out of his lab and into his bunk, and how she was threatening to call one of the medical staff to examine him.

"I have a cold, Mako, and contrary to popular belief one does not actually need to see a doctor over a cold. That’s a disgustingly classist myth created by our productivity-obsessed bureaucratic government and enforced by the commercialized pharmaceutical industry.”

"You dissect Kaiju every day," she argued, all patience, "who knows what kind of strange bacteria you might have breathed in?"

“I do,” Newt snapped, “I am perfectly aware of everything that goes through my lab. I am the world’s foremost xenobiologist, if Kaiju meat released some kind of airborne bacterium that mimicked the common cold I would know about it!”

"If you say so," said Mako resignedly, then turned and headed for the door. Newt very determinedly did not think about how rude he’d been to her, how much she didn’t deserve rudeness after everything she’d done for him, and how he should probably call her back and apologize.

Once he’d successfully squandered his chance to make amends he flopped back onto his bed and stared at the rusty ceiling. There was really nothing to do but wait, now; the common cold took a week untreated and seven days with medication, so the only thing to do was wait for it to pass. The idea of spending seven whole days away from his lab was making him want to claw at his own skin, so he tried to come up with useful things he could do that didn’t involve leaving his bunk. He could catch up on paperwork (torture on top of illness, not likely). He could check up on the current literature in kaiju xenobiology (a sparse handful of amateurs whose work was vastly inferior to his own). He could design a new Kaiju tattoo (a pointless endeavor honestly, the more recent Kaiju had been rather uninspired in terms of unique features, and certainly nothing he cared to immortalize).

None of it sounded appealing.

Newt rolled over in bed, turning to stare at his Kaiju-poster bedecked wall. He wanted to sleep, to let unconsciousness pass the time for him, but his skin was tingly and hot, and it felt like it could barely contain him.

He really wished he had some split pea soup.

Just as he was beginning to calculate exactly how much ibuprofen it would take to knock out someone of his height and weight without doing serious damage to his stomach lining, there came a knock at his door.

"It’s open!" Newt called, expecting another chance to apologize to Mako, but to his surprise it was Hermann who pushed open the door and hobbled inside, awkwardly as he tried to maneuver his cane and simultaneously support the tray he was holding.

"What are you doing here?" Newt demanded, more out of surprise than anything, then winced as he realized how discourteous that sounded. Add that to the list of reasons he hated being sick: it seemed to make him exceedingly rude.

Hermann glowered at him. “I brought you soup,” he grumbled, holding up the tray as he sat down in Newt’s desk chair and wheeled it over to the bed, “but if you’re not going to be gracious about it, I might as well leave.”

"No no!" Newt said hurriedly, "I’m very grateful! Please, continue with the soup!"

Hermann grumbled something under his breath, but set the tray on the edge of Newt’s bed, allowing Newt to see the contents of the bowl.

"Split pea?" he asked in surprise, staring at the thick green fluid, much too watery but obviously the very thing he had been craving.

"Yes," said Hermann concisely, "now hurry up and eat it, before it gets colder than it already is."

Newt nodded eagerly, picking up the spoon and dipping it gently into the bowl, but almost immediately a gentle rattling sound filled the air as the handle clattered against the tin dish and the soup he’d managed to spoon up dropped immediately back into the bowl.

Drat. This was why he couldn’t do experiments like this; colds always gave him the shakes.

He expected Hermann to throw up his hands in exhasperation and leave him their to incompetently eat his soup, getting most of it down his front, but to Newt’s surprise Hermann knocked his hand away from the spoon and picked it up himself. He spooned up a mouthful of soup, let the excess drip off, then held it up to Newt’s mouth.

"Seriously?" Newt asked, eyes wide.

"I see no other way you’ll get it down," Hermann said waspishly.

Newt couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he opened his mouth and let Herman feed him. It was as watery as it looked, and had too much salt (damn cafeteria staff always overspiced everything) but it was split pea soup and it wasn’t bad per say. Better than nothing.

"So how’d you know this is what I want when I’m sick?" Newt asked, after a few mouthfuls of companionable silence.

"You mentioned it in a letter," Hermann said, as if remembering something Newt had told him in a letter at least two decades ago was the most natural thing in the world. "Something about peas having the chemical content of the neurotransmitters associated with pleasure, and pain relief, and falling in love."

Newt wiggled his eyebrows, unable to resist the obvious joke. “Trying to seduce me are you?”

Hermann whacked him on the nose with the spoon. “Just eat, you heathen,” he hissed.

Newt couldn’t think of anything to say to that either, so he kept quite and let his lab partner spoon feed him split pea soup.


End file.
